With Obama now looking for his fourth SECDEF in six years, his foreign-policy in tatters and the Oval Office's relationship with the Pentagon and the military in general obviously let's say

troubled people are wondering what is causing this malaise and coming to the conclusion it's groupthink taking control of Obama and his inner circle and leading to the spoilage of good ideas and coherent strategic thought.

How is this new? The liberal elite is defined by its contempt for other people's ideas and anyone who does not share in their ostensibly enlightened view of things - they're idealists and therefore by nature, given the flimsy assumptions that hold their ideological pretensions together, must guard against open debate and the opinions of skeptics. These people are all about groupthink. 

No clear thinking unbiased person should be shocked at all by what we're seeing here. Obama came into into office with the clear intention of emasculating American power and shrinking its strategic footprint - his arrogance, seconded by the grotesque delusions of the liberal elite, told him that the vacuum left behind would be filled by his Progressive brilliance and the world would be led by him into a new and oh so pretty direction. (What would've been of note is if such a detached from reality view of things had not brought Obama into conflict with the reality-based community of the military. It was a virtual guarantee that the US military would come to dislike and distrust this commander-in-chief - and I'm guessing the distrust began when he ignored the advice of his generals and decided to apply an arbitrary endpoint to his phony 'surge' in Afghanistan)

Again, anyone who bought into the utter nonsense spouted by this man should be utterly ashamed of themselves. There is absolutely nothing surprising about how awful a president this guy is. 

I've been saying for a while now that Turkey can no longer be considered a reliable member of NATO and a trusted ally of the West given Erdogan's arch Islamist sentiments and therefore its continuing membership in the Western alliance should be deeply questioned and the sale of the F 35 to them should be suspended or at least brought under review - and yet we hear absolutely nothing from the leaders of the West.

Two recent events should absolutely bring an end to that silence and if they do not then one will only be able to conclude that political correctness by Western leaders is judged as a more important thing than strategic coherence. Erdogan has openly declared in a speech that the West is the enemy of Islam and went so far as to say that the people of the west enjoy watching Muslims die - there's no way to rationalize rhetoric like that in defense of Turkey's  continuing membership in a Western alliance - but damning as those words are there's something worse: Israeli intelligence has uncovered material support by Turkey for Palestinian terror by allowing Hamas to set up a 'command' infrastructure in Turkey - this is completely unacceptable and should be condemned at the highest level.

And yet we hear nothing except of course from Israel which is rightly outraged. Only a fool at this point would expect leadership on an issue like this from Obama and so it will be up to the Republican controlled Congress to raise the appropriate concern - if they don't one is really going to have to wonder just how detached from coherent strategic thought the West overall is.

Now I suppose one could argue that booting the only Muslim entity from NATO would do more harm than good and so the best of the Bad options is to ignore Erdogan's abuses and that amounts to a form of strategic coherence. Okay, maybe - it also amounts to a form of sticking ones head in the sand when it comes to the problem of Islamism not being compatible with Western notions of liberty and personal freedom and the open marketplace of ideas enshrined in our democratic institutions. I get that you often form alliances with people you don't agree with - but you do not form binding alliances with people who see you as the enemy and give open support to the enemies of your strategic partners - that's insane. 

I got to say I know the left-wing is unhinged and it's various activist branches are unhinged and irrational and pretty much addled into a blinded intemperate stupidity by their ideological fixations - but still I'm shocked at how desperate they are to turn what happened in Ferguson, a perfectly justified act of self-defense against a kid who thought it a good idea to go gangster on some cop, into some great cause of social justice - it's almost beyond belief the utter nonsense you hear being spoken by supposedly intelligent people never mind the atrocious and rabid hatred you hear coming from people with no claims to intelligence whatsoever. And there's even protests in London, England? Where are the protests condemning young British Muslims running off to Syria to behead people? It's absolutely absurd what's going on here.

Western civilization will not survive the modern incarnation of liberalism if this is the irrational form it is increasingly going to be taking.

The sad farce in Ferguson demonstrates yet again the wholly dispiriting truth that African-American culture will continue to suffer and wallow in dysfunction just so long as liberals need blacks to forever and always see themselves as victims. The rush to judgment by the liberal elite in this case in order to score shallow and pestilential and ruinous and utterly divisive ideological points was just astounding. It was pretty clear from the beginning that the cop was defending himself against some kid who had just robbed a store and decided to go all gangster on him - you do not fire your gun nine or 10 times in order to execute some innocent youth who's supposedly surrendering with his hands up - you fire your gun that many times because you're in fear for your life! But facts and common sense just don't matter to the liberal elite, they've proven that over and over and over again - all they really care about are their ideological pretensions. 

An interesting question has been raised - if the deal Iran has turned down was in fact a good deal for them if indeed their plan is to develop nuclear weapons, then why did they turn it down, especially with Republicans about to take over Congress?

Well... could be they've taken the full measure of Obama and simply do not see him as a serious threat at all. Could be that Obama has already promised them that he intends to bypass Congress when it comes to the signing of any treaty. Could be that not fearing Obama at all the whole purpose now is to make America look weak and pathetic, an outcome that would bring much pleasure to Russia and China. 

On second thought I'm beginning to think that Obama's immigration ploy indeed was unconstitutional   - the feeling seems to be that the granting of what amounts to a virtual amnesty to so many illegals prevents or makes impossible any individual review of their cases and that that failure or abuse amounts to a de facto rewriting of immigration law and therefore what Obama has done is unconstitutional. I dunno - I ain't no scholar - but it's very hard to believe that something so egregiously dictatorial wouldn't be unconstitutional - that seems to insult common sense. 

Let it be understood that if come Monday nuclear negotiations with Iran are extended once again that will be a clear victory for the theocracy and will be tantamount to the signing of the weak deal (which I still expect will happen) - it will also clearly indicate what I've said all along: that iran holds the strong hand here because the West (by which we primarily mean Obama) is so desperate to avoid its promise to use whatever means necessary to stop the theocracy from becoming a nuclear power - meaning of course the military option. Iran and its co-conspirators Russia and China have always known that Obama had absolutely no intention of embracing the military option and therefore these negotiations have been nothing but a shell game managed by them. Iran has known all along that Obama needed to get a deal much more than they needed to make a deal - they've acted all along as if they're  in the catbird seat and that's because they are snd Obama's words and actions put them there.

(and here we go word just in that deadline has indeed been put off until next year - Obama is simply looking for a phony deal that he can sell as viable even though it isn't just so he can crawl out of this mess and hand it off to the next president - and Iran won't even give him that which tells you all you need to know about what they think of Obama - since no one believes for a second that Obama will use force the only thing that could possibly save this mess is the reapplication of stringent penalties - but Iran has manipulated Obama and this process as if they believe that will be impossible to do and no doubt Russia and China have assured them behind closed doors that that is the case - which means for all intents and purposes America has now adopted a containment policy re Iran nuke program - now we just wait and see what Israel does)

As to whether Obama's immigration diktat is unconstitutional, from the scholars I tend to rely on I get the feeling it probably is not given precedents governing executive privilege - although the scope of what he's done raises deep concerns and the details as to what rights exactly Obama is conferring on illegals could change the constitutional math - but just choosing not to pursue deportations of a broad swath of illegals does not seem to be unconstitutional regardless of it looking like a damn silly way to run a democracy. 

Is it good for the country? No - hell, I don't even know if it's good for Latinos given that it completely ruins any chance of achieving comprehensive immigration policy reform. 

Typical of just about everything Obama does this is just another cynical political calculation - unless you're going to give liberals everything they want they're not interested in immigration reform - Obama has and has never had any interest in negotiating a compromise deal with Republicans - the status quo of a broken immigration policy and a porus border serve his interests much better because he gets to make disingenuous populist gestures like this which binds Latinos to the left in perpetuity and when the Republicans try to take it away he gets to paint them as racist and unreasonable. 

Obama simply does not care if the move is unpopular in general or even unconstitutional - he doesn't have to win another election - all he cares about is turning Latinos into a solidly liberal voting bloc similar to African-Americans.  Conservatives going on about how he's a hypocrite because he said so many times in the past that doing what he's just done is unconstitutional and now claims it isn't do not realize that the man lies about everything - he didn't believe it was unconstitutional, he doesn't even care if it's unconstitutional, he just had to say that in order to keep the base mollified while winning elections by pretending to be a moderate. I don't understand why conservatives have so much trouble grasping this about the man - he lies - I don't know if he's ever stepped in front of a microphone and said anything that wasn't a complete load of bullshit - he does this because the media lets him get away with it and it would be impossible to push through his left wing agenda without lying - and he does it because for people like Obama if you do not agree with them and share in the refulgent glory of their beliefs then you're an idiot and do not deserve their respect.

Liberals of Obama's ilk truly view democracy as something that is beneath them and therefore come to see it as nothing more than a clumsy means to grant a phony legitimacy to the 'enlightened' autocracy which is the end they seek. Central to this ruinous ambition is the corruption of the media and that is the most fascinating and disturbing thing about the Obama presidency - this corruption has been thoroughly exposed. And so the really important question now becomes not how do you stop Obama per se but rather how do you fix or counteract the corruption that he relies on to do what he does? Conservatives and even moderates need to have an answer to this threat because every Liberal leader who now comes down the road will try to imitate him - and if that means that sometime soon we're going to end up with a president Elizabeth Warren then that's it, it's over, say goodbye to America. 

Finally a conservative commentator who gets Obama and with eyes free of illusion and fond hopes sees perfectly what Dear Leader and his ilk are all about - Cooke simply nails it with this essay.

What's amazing is how many conservatives have failed to fully grasp this reality about the man - Obama is a far left wing ideologue who wants to push the country as far left as possible in hopes that it can never be pulled back and he doesn't care if he has to break the law or abuse the Constitution or tell blatant lies to do it because as far as he's concerned and people like him are concerned if you do not share in their vision of America then by definition there's something wrong with you and therefore they do not have to respect your opinion nor concern themselves with conventions and formalities that do not serve their purpose - this is why the liberal elite can with such cynical self serving ease dismiss democracy as something that is more of an inconvenient hindrance than a virtue.

As Cooke points out, conservatives and even ostensibly unbiased moderates who are arguing that Democrats will rue the day Obama behaved in such a reckless way are failing to grasp two crucial problems - the media wants Obama and people who think like him to win - and the fantasies championed by the welfare state are much better suited to the buying of votes than the hard truths and realities conservatives are offering.

This cynical ideological extremism hiding behind the mask of moderation is also why I tend to disagree with people who look at Obama's disastrous foreign-policy and see it as a manifestation of incompetence - it's not incompetence if it's your goal to turn America into a second rate power, if it's your goal to open the door to the decline of America as a strategic military force to be feared and respected, if it's your goal to rig together a new world order where America is seen as nothing special - if those are your goals then Obama's foreign policy is not about incompetence but rather about a deliberate design.

That being said, let's keep in mind how the best laid plans etc etc - Obama and his liberal elite catamites are no doubt of the opinion that all the advantages fall to their side now and the great  left-wing autocracy waits but a few short steps down the road - but life do have a way of trippin' a person up. In Greek tragedy things usually don't go too well for people like Obama, hubris being the handmaiden of bad stuff and all - unfortunately, things tend not to go too well for anybody else either - and I am afraid that's the true fate lying in wait for us down the road. 

Is there anything that demonstrates the posturing emptiness of modern liberalism better than the Democrat's stance on the Keystone pipeline? Stopping it achieves absolute utely nothing other than the throwing away of good jobs, the needless pissing off a valuable ally and with astounding strategic incompetence  pushing it towards China, and of course finally offering up a soapbox from which bloviating progressives can congratulate themselves on being so gosh darn wonderful. That's it. If one believes in the threat of 'climate change' stopping Keystone does absolutely nothing to mitigate that fanciful threat.

Marvel at how nonsensical the rhetoric is - liberals caterwaul about how the pipeline would add to carbon emissions even though all it will do is transfer oil  from Canada to Louisiana that regardless is gonna go somewhere pipeline or not and yet Obama defends his stonewalling of the project by saying there's no evidence it will reduce gas prices for Americans - this makes no sense since if you're worried about carbon emissions the last thing you should be advocating for is lower gas prices that encourage more driving. 

But then of course Obama and his catamites don't need to make sense since the whole point of this charade is to grandstand in appeasement of the ideological pretensions of the eternally  nonsensical, bereft of coherent thought uber left.

It's almost as if under progressive leadership the democracies of the west are in a competition to see who can govern worst. 

With the recent terrorist attack in Jerusalem Obama once again embraces the obfuscating moral relativism of the liberal mind and worldview when it comes to Islamist extremism by condemning the act but wrapping that condemnation in language that makes it seem like both Israelis and Palestinians are at fault. What is it with the progressives of the Western world and Israel? Are they all anti-Semites? Does hatred of Israel become a proxy that allows them to vent their hatred of what they see as the evils of white capitalist imperialism? Does Israel's existence and the Muslim hatred of it become an inconvenient truth that shines an uncomfortable light on just how misguided the liberal worldview is? Or are progressives just naïve idiots blinded to the folly of their beliefs by the arrogance of their delusions?

John Kerry says US not intimidated by ISIS. That the secretary of state feels the need to make such an idiotic statement proves either that the Obama administration is indeed intimidated by ISIS or has no clue whatsoever what to do about the threat - or indicates that absent an actual strategy they believe that the giving of bellicose speeches will suffice. One really can't say it enough: worst president ever. 

The tyranny of the liberal elite

The central assumption animating Obama's whole approach to governing is that the media will allow him to say whatever he wants to say, get away with whatever he desires to get away with and spin whatever narrative he chooses to spin So that he may impose his extreme left wing ideological preferences on the American people regardless of whether or not they like or agree with those preferences. Given this assumption and the enabling facts that the media very clearly is willing to comply with it and the liberal elite is very clearly of the opinion that democracy is a ruse designed to keep the unenlightened under thumb Obama does not need to trouble himself with caring about what Republicans think nor with what people who vote for Republicans think. This is what a liberal autocracy looks like and this is what happens when an ostensibly free media and press in essence give up their right to free speech in order to subvert objective critical analysis and debate by championing the beliefs and causes of a chosen side.